It does convey that message, but it's a bit over the top to say that's the only way to convey the message. You could, for instance, have them walk around on leashes with collars around their necks.

The Logain’s army battle scene really stuck out as badly done. It feels like low budget, amateur work done for a highschool film project. Everything from the lighting to the choreography to the special effects feels cheap and shoddy.

But as I said before, they’ve already changed so much that nothing is likely to happen like it did in the book. No reason to expect them to bend over backwards to make Mat in particular hit his book notes.

In general, I've stopped starting fiction (either watching or reading) unless I know that the ending has already been written and isn't widely panned. It does mean that I'm not current with new things, but I figure I'm doing my small part to protest against what I see as rather widespread proliferation of premises and world building being allowed to substitute for actual payoff and resolution in fiction writing. It's worse in TV writing, but written fiction is guilty as well.

The very concepts of good and evil are assumed. There are various proofs that could be offered to show that free will (with the implied ability to choose evil) is an intrinsic good. However, they all obviously rely on a definition of good and evil that must be assumed. How do you define intrinsic good and evil?

I've heard that. My point is that it no longer makes sense. Order matters. For Rand to now learn to sword fight is like deciding to perfect crawling when he has already proven he is the faster runner in the world.

The scene is fun. The problem I have is that it effectively means that sword Rand never happens. Obviously, you can still have him learn the sword. But a big part of Rand learning the sword was that he couldn't count on using the one power and needed to defend himself. It's humanizing. But if he can mass power word kill way more people than he could ever hope to fight with a sword, there just isn't a good justification for learning to use a sword. Thus, in the show Rand is always the fraud carrying the blademaster's sword and never the blademaster.

Because free will is an inherent good and overriding free will is therefore at least somewhat evil. A person who is forced to do good things is not himself evil, but neither is he good. His capacity to choose good has been destroyed. Do you think that slavery is good if the slaveowner only makes his slaves do good things? What if he frees his slaves and one of them becomes a criminal that causes suffering? Is his decision to free them now an evil decision? Also, I would add that suffering is not an inherent evil. It can be the result of evil, but it can also exist for other reasons. Reducing suffering is good, but when other evil is committed to reduce suffering, that action may not be good. Every person on the earth will suffer at some point in the future. If reducing suffering was an inherent good, murdering people might be justified for the simple reason that killing them will prevent their future suffering. Of course, their death might cause others to suffer additionally, but it might not. And in the hypothetical, the additional sufferers could also be killed. Balefiring an entire city would likely reduce a great deal of suffering without so many loose ends to suffer so long as whole families are taken together. To be clear, I realize that these aren't easy questions and that the answers are also not black and white. That's why it's interesting for a series of thousands of pages to explore these issues. But to say that it makes no sense for free will to be recognized for its inherent value and good is an oversimplification that deserves pushback and exploration.

Almost like the complaints aren’t just about the show ruining gender dynamics. It’s also the fact that the replacement story isn’t very good.

At this point, I don't expect the show to go much beyond season 3. But if it does, I also don't think we can reasonably expect the plot to even hit major points from the book in a recognizable way. At best, we'll get individual scenes that look like certain scenes from the book, but there is essentially no chance that the way these scenes are connected and fit together will resemble the book. That is already what happened in season 2 more often than not, and it will only continue to compound. Worrying about how Galad will make peace with Perrin is completely irrelevant.

I thought that was obvious. Siuan is gay and fabulous. She can't have a boyfriend.

That was lots of marketing and intrigue, like I said. The dragon wasn’t ever going to be anyone else. As far as competence, I’d say they are far more competent than you are giving them credit since they clearly understood that Rand needs to be the dragon. If you think they were ever seriously considering making anyone else the dragon, you are the one questioning their competence.

This is the fiction writing version of the alcoholic who can quit whenever he wants to. It was always going to be Rand and anyone who says differently is either creating intrigue or not really paying attention to the long term effects. With things like Jain Farstrider, I tend to just assume that nobody was paying attention to the details rather than ascribing meaning to throw away lines. Occam’s razor is that somebody assumed Jain is a girl’s name and didn’t check. Also, there is a Firefly tangent in here somewhere.

It's odd that fantasy often portrays battle magic as a toolbox when practically speaking it would probably mostly just be a gun equivalent. While some situations that require creative problem solving might arise occasionally, much of the time the magic wielder just needs to kill or incapacitate a number of roughly humanoid enemies. There should be a best way to do that and it should pretty much always be the best. Of course, that gets boring, but it's a bit weird to me that magic users are so often getting creative in battle. Is Moiraine good at throwing stones? Great. She should pretty much always default to that. Or is it lightning bolts or fireballs? Also fine. But there needs to be a justification for switching it up and most fantasy is weak on this front. Not really about the show in particular and I get why it happens. But just a sort of side-tangent.

Considering the attention to detail that we've seen so far, there's a good chance they just thought that was Galad's last name.

I'm wondering if it's actually just the original forsaken. It seems in this version of the story there are only 8 instead of 13. Last season, they played with the idea that the forsaken were a shadow version of the main characters in this age. This plays up the angle that it's all about the choices you make.

Have you met any 20 year olds? They act like children all the time. I agree that Mat's character is sort of weird early on since it's simultaneously implied that he has some experience carousing and also that he doesn't. And, as you say, how could he?

A one page summary would never include a list of things that didn't happen or shouldn't be included. By that logic, Rand killing his father in a fit of rage would also not be a huge departure from the book since Tam probably doesn't even make the 1 page summary. From a character development standpoint, Rand being innocent and Mat not being a scumbag are sort of important. And Perrin growing into his own sense of manhood is very important. None of the things mentioned sink the show on its own. They are just huge red flags that the creators don't get it. TV needs to use images and symbols to efficiently give us information about the characters and story. These symbols and images are contradicting what needs to be told about the characters early on to set them up for their book arcs.

I saw that too and was at first wondering if that is actually Avi, but Avi wouldn’t be caught dead in heeled boots.

I enjoy the prologues. To enjoy the WoT you have to be willing to go with the flow and not worry about getting back to any particular story line right away. If you only want to hear about the main characters and their plotlines, the prologues can feel like a drag.

What are the apostrophes in the old tongue supposed to mean? Are they guttural stops, pauses, omitted vowel sounds (if so, which ones), or something else? Are they just added to make it look fantasy? How do you pronounce them when reading? Personally, I just read the words as if the apostrophe weren't there and assume that they are sort of added for "flavor." But I'm not sure that is the intention. Thoughts?